A C P A N E W S Concrete Pavement Industry Supports FHWA Climate Challenge AS PART OF A DEPARTMENT-WIDE EFFORT that challenged transportation agencies and others to find innovative ways to reduce transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions, the Federal Highway Administration launched its own highway-specific “Climate Challenge” on Quantifying Emissions of Sustainable Pavements. This challenge presents a unique opportunity to improve the sustainability of pavement systems. The ACPA applauds FHWA’s Climate Challenge initiative as an important step toward truly sustainable pavements. The concrete pavement industry is fully committed to reducing our carbon footprint and is actively working to adopt and implement techniques and tools like Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) and Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) to move our sector toward a more sustainable built environment. We embrace the use of these tools to help measure and document progress toward net-zero emission pavement solutions. What’s more, our industry has already made huge strides toward increasing the sustainability of concrete pavements. Recent steps include mixture optimization, maximizing the use of Supplementary Cementitious Materials (SCMs), embracing portland-limestone cement (PLC), and more. Today’s embodied CO2 footprint of a typical paving mixture is as much as 40% lower than just a few decades ago. And while our industry is fully committed to reducing the embodied carbon of our pavement mixtures, we are also acutely aware of the broader carbon footprint associated with pavements. It is the concrete pavement industry’s perspective that we can and should embrace all available opportunities to reduce the overall life-cycle carbon emissions associated with pavements. While the importance of reducing our embodied carbon cannot be understated, the embodied carbon footprint is only part of a concrete pavement’s overall life cycle footprint. In many cases, the embodied portion of total carbon emissions in a pavement’s overall life cycle is very small. When specifying a new pavement or overlay project, we aren’t just selecting a material—we’re selecting a solution that will be in service for decades. Therefore, when procuring a material with the goal of lowering carbon, we certainly should consider embodied impacts, but not at the exclusion of all the other impacts, including use-phase impacts. In order to make meaningful and lasting reductions in the overall life-cycle environmental impacts of our pavement investments, we need to reduce our embodied impact—something EPDs can help us do—and we need to minimize our use-phase impacts as much as possible (since those impacts often dwarf the embodied impacts). As we already have the tools to help us accomplish this, the opportunity for the pavement sector to make impactful and lasting reductions in the overall carbon impacts of our roadway infrastructure is within reach. Read ACPA’s full response here: Read more about the FHWA Climate Challenge: Read more about the concrete pavement industry’s sustainability benefits: www.acpa.org 27 Quarter 2, 2022
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